short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed appetite. Every day’s necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all night when we lay in his lap and slept in his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from one death, and lays up for another: and while we think a thought we die; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our portion of eternity; we form our words with the breath of our nostrils, we have the less to live upon for every word we speak. Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are the instruments of acting it: and God by all the variety of his Providence makes us see death every where, in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person. Nature hath given us one harvest every year, but death hath two: and the spring and the autumn sends throngs of men and women to charnel-houses; and all the summer long men are recovering from their evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the Syrian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are laid up for all the year’s provision, and the man that gathers them eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid up for eternity; and he that escapes till the winter only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter’s cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit, cold and agues, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to death; and you can go no whither but you tread upon a dead man’s bones. DEATH BEFORE ADAM. Two hundred years ago, long before the science of Geology called for the belief that mortality had been stamped on creation, and had manifested its proofs in the animal races previously to Adam’s appearance, Jeremy Taylor could write as follows regarding Adam himself before the Fall. He considers him to have been created mortal; not merely liable to become mortal, but actually mortal. “For ‘flesh and blood,’ that is, whatsoever is born of Adam, ‘cannot inherit the kingdom of God.’ And they are injurious to Christ who think that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; ‘he brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.’” Again: “For that Adam was made mortal in his nature is infinitely certain, and proved by his very eating and drinking, his sleep and recreation, &c.”